This chapter reads George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894) as a late-Victorian novel whose proto-modernist qualities render it a transformational, rather than a transitional, work of fiction. After placing the novel within Moore’s prolific oeuvre, the chapter foregrounds the text’s class concerns by focusing on the social aspirations of its characters, their actual social mobility (both upwards and downwards), and the question of social determinism and personal free will. Esther Waters is then situated within the contexts of Aestheticism and Impressionism, fin-de-siécle movements which shaped the representation of its protagonist’s consciousness. This section also highlights the novel’s literary qualities evident in its narrative focalisation, the use of free indirect speech, and the structural circularity of its plot. Finally, this chapter sketches the novel’s critical reception from the early twentieth century to the twenty-first.